Yes.

In its original theoretical form, “artificial intelligence” was synonymous with "machine intelligence "

But in its current heavily hyped and marketed form, it’s actually synonymous with “fake intelligence.”

There’s a lesson there…

Mostly escapism.

I prefer stoicism, but it’s tough and I’m weak and lazy. So to the degree that I have to deal with the real world, I mostly rely on some combination of cynicism and fatalism.

But as much as possible, I escape.

Imitation meats have never impressed me. They get close, but they inevitably fall just enough short of tasting and feeling like real meat that it feels to me like a wasted effort. I think I’d like them better, oddly enough, if they didn’t even pretend to be meat - if they were marketed as something else entirely.

I love the concept of lab-grown meat, and it seems as if it should be without issue, since it basically is meat in all senses, except that it’s grown in a vat instead of inside an animal’s skin. But since I haven’t had a chance to try it, I can’t say.

I’ve always been confused by this whole concept of telling myself things about myself. I see it regularly in self-help things - “You just need to tell yourself ‘I’m a good person’” or whatever - but it doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. I’m not two different people, so I can’t tell myself something that I don’t already know. If it’s true and I can say it to myself, that’s necessarily because I already know it. And it’s not as if I can bullshit myself without knowing that that’s what I’m doing.

Sorry - probably not the sort of response you were hoping for.

One of the very few satisfying things about gung ho murderous assholes is their self-righteous shock when the psychopaths they worship throw them under the bus.

“That’s a lie! They still want me!”

Different reasons for different people.

Some because they expect to benefit from it - they expect to be a part of the autocracy.

Some because they’re angry and stupid and all they know is that people they hate are unhappy about it, so it must be a good thing.

Some because they can’t wrap their heads around it - they can’t believe that it’s really happening.

Some because they think they’re powerless to stop it.

And some because they just want to watch the world burn.

Every single person on the planet just happened to be born in some particular place, and every place has some particular set of people who at some point drew some arbitrary lines and decreed that the area within the lines was a country and gave it a name.

The idea that happening to have been born within the confines of one arbitrary set of lines rather than another is something of which to be proud is blatantly stupid.

That’s likely true.

But that’s not going to stop governments from trying, and mostly succeeding, since beating their censorship will require both the will and the ability to break the law. Granted that their systems will certainly be flawed, it will still require at least some minimal technical ability to beat them, which will put it out of reach of many.

And it will also provide the governments with a handy fallback charge to bring against pretty much anyone they deem troublesome enough, since they’ll almost certainly be among those who are breaking the law by beating the system.

Since the earliest days of the internet, governments have been scheming to gain control over the dissemination of content - to have authority over what people can and cannot see.

Autocracies like Russia, China and North Korea simply established censorships regimes, but the best that western governments have generally been able to do is ban content that is illegal in and of itself, like child porn. Their goal, all along, has been to establish systems by which to censor content that is not in and of itself illegal.

This is the most success they’ve had yet.

Very much yes.

I have this great visual image of the corporate web, marked by neon signs and billboards and holographic ads, populated entirely by bots talking to each other while the humans sneak away, giggling and shushing each other.

As intended.

First they’re going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.

Then they’re going to put all of the information they’ve been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.

Right - that’s the new Christian Single Commandment - “Thou only need bother to be somewhat less evil than those other people over there.”

It was wonderfully awful.

Faced with a whole bunch of users and mods angry because Reddit had just announced that they were going to price third party apps out of existence, Spez apparently decided to do some damage control, and then couldn’t manage to be anything other than alternately petulant and sanctimonious.

I never really liked Reddit much, and avoided it for a long time. It was just too big and too shallow.

I finally had to give in in about 2015, because there just weren’t any other good threaded message boards left. But I was always on the lookout for somewhere new.

Over the years, I followed links to every new board I happened on but they never panned out. Then, in the wake of Spez’s pretentious AMA, I happened on a link to lemmy. I expected it to just be another failure, but I found I liked, and more broadly, liked the fediverse. And the more I looked around, the more I liked it. And I just never left.

Sort of on-topic - I disable the music in most first person open world RPGs.

It started with Oblivion. I first disabled it because I didn’t like that the combat music is triggered as soon as you’re detected by an enemy - it feels like a cheat. But the thing I discovered was that it did wonders for immersion, because suddenly the only sounds I heard were actual in-universe sounds - footsteps, wind, flowing water, animals etc.

After playing like that for a couple of years, I got the urge to listen to the music again, so I re-enabled it. And it was very weird, because I had gotten so used to only hearing in-universe sounds that I kept subconsciously trying to place the music in the world - like there was a symphony orchestra in a forest clearing nearby or something. I had to turn it off and have never turned it back on.

I’ve never even heard the Skyrim music - I disabled it right from the start.

The only exceptions are game music that actually is in-universe, like the music played over your Pip-Boy in Fallout or over a car radio in GTA.

I watched it in person, sort of.

I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.

And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.

And they put razor blades in Halloween candy too!

And further - the establishment of a single, fediverse-wide account for each user would make it far too easy for those so inclined to silence anyone they wanted merely by banning their one and only account.